[Dog Days of Summer] Cats & Dogs (& Suffering)
When I think back to my childhood, there were plenty of movies I would watch countless times, despite the fact it drove my parents mad. I haven’t watched most of these films since I was a child (Oliver & Company and All Dogs Go to Heaven come to mind), but one stuck out like a sore thumb: Cats & Dogs. Even though I loved Cats & Dogs as a kid, a rewatch a several years ago pained me to no end. My expectations were lower than you could imagine when revisiting Cats & Dogs, but upon this latest viewing, I was kind of pleasantly surprised.
Don’t get me wrong, Cats & Dogs is a bad movie. Despite having a potentially fun premise of having dog spies trying to take down a syndicate of evil cats hellbent on world domination, Cats & Dogs is as formulaic as kids movies get. Your usual expected clichés such as cartoon sound effects being paired with action scenes, a down on his luck boy not getting the attention he needs from his parents, and a father who’s so busy with his work, he can’t take the time to connect with his son are laced deep into the core of Cats & Dogs’ plot. What had surprised me, was that although Cats & Dogs is about as generic and generally bad as kids movies could get at the time, it wasn’t particularly painful to watch. A lot of the ease from revisiting Cats & Dogs came from the short runtime (eighty-seven-minutes in length, shorter including credits), the rather quick pacing for the narrative, and some surprising charms found within a few performances, as well as the generally aged, but somewhat charming visual effects.
It’s obvious when viewing a visual effects-heavy film from the 2000s that said effects are going to be rough around the edges; Cats & Dogs is no exception to this. Some CG animations of characters look rather rough, including any effects-heavy action scenes, and the heavy use of animatronics is rather neat in design, but appear… well, robotic. This all isn’t to say that Cats & Dogs didn’t look great for its time, because when reminiscing on other late 90s to early 00s films, especially kids movies, Cats & Dogs doesn’t look half-bad. I was surprised to see that many of the facial animations for making the animals talk in this movie don’t look half bad; I’m as surprised as you are. Again, there’s some noticeable age on the rotoscoping between the mouth movements and placing them on live animals, yet the effort is admirable, and frankly doesn’t look all that bad by today’s standards.
As for the casting, there are no performances I’d honestly consider bad. Usually within a kids movie, notable actors who’re brought on board to try and add some star power to a movie phone in their performances hardcore, however, I noticed an astounding amount of dedicated performances, primarily by the voice-only cast. Unfortunately, it’s within the voice cast where we see Cats & Dogs’ most poorly aged feature: a small, yet still concerning amount of weird racial stereotypes. Cats & Dogs doesn’t boast the most diverse cast out there (we’ll get to that in a bit), but one scene in particular raised a notable red flag: the ninja cat ambush scene. At one point during the story, hired contractors for the leading antagonist, Mr. Tinkles, is sent in to infiltrate the science lab of Lou (our primary protagonist)’s owner’s lab (that’s a sentence). In this scene, a group of — what appears to be — Siamese cats do battle against Lou to eliminate him and breach the lab, yet these cats brandish comedically stereotypical accents and have tropey Asian-inspired music play as they do battle against Lou. Normally, this wouldn’t be considered too much of a problem despite the fact that these cats are voiced by white actors, which was a rather prevalent issue across the voice-acting sphere for some time (it’s arguably still an issue today). Thankfully, the scene is brief, yet it’s still distasteful in the grand scope of representation, and the film, itself.
As for the remaining cast, any human actors to the story are all white besides two Jewish actors: Miriam Margolyes, and dreamboat Jeff Goldblum (always worth keeping in mind though, that Goldblum has recently faced controversies concerning comments he gave during Ru Pal’s Drag Race, and his defense of strongly alleged child molester: Woody Allen). Although Goldblum’s character has a bit more time to shine in the spotlight, it’s nice having two prominent Jewish actors in the film. Besides our two in-person, non-white actors, there’s a tad bit of diversity to the voice cast, but not much, including prominent, openly gay Will & Grace star, Sean Hayes, as well as the late Michael Clark Duncan. The general lack of overall diversity to Cats & Dogs isn’t much of an issue when viewing it on the surface. It’s obviously nice to have a cast flowing with diversity, yet it isn’t particularly an issue, considering the subject matter of the movie and that the narrative’s silly and generally non-political in nature. The lack of diversity does become an issue, though, when looking at the ninja cat ambush scene, which again, isn’t particularly long, yet distasteful.
As I said before, Cats & Dogs still isn’t a good movie; it’s not as painfully bad as I remembered it to be, and has a few charming qualities to it (including one gag towards the end that got a chuckle out of me), but it isn’t anything I’d full-on recommend. If you’re sick and tired of watching Frozen for the fortieth time during lockdown with your kids, Cats & Dogs can provide some mindless entertainment for them for a while. Cats & Dogs doesn’t provide any actual messages for children in the film, it’s rather shallow, although a complex, educational narrative wasn’t anywhere close to an actual goal for this script, yet it still might prove fun for the young ones. There’s a possible lesson available in the cat scene, talking about the importance of proper representation, yet a conversation like that would fly over any kid’s head that marks for the target demographic of this movie.
If you want to watch Cats & Dogs for yourself, it’s currently streaming on Hulu.
